


Quiet Revenge

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [144]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Business Division, Canon Compliant, Fix-It, Gen, Maybe Not Entirely Fictional, POV First Person, Psi Corps, Slice of Life, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 13:26:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17284883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: A telepath recalls how they got revenge on a very irritating mundane coworker.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!New toBehind the Gloves? What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? Seehere.





	Quiet Revenge

**Author's Note:**

> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Oh, the revenge story?

There's not much to it, I suppose.

Back before the Crisis, back at the company new employees had to go through an orientation at HR. Part of that included a short vid explaining the role of business telepaths... most of them had never met a telepath before, so there was this vid that explained who we were and what we did, that sort of thing. It was standard Psi Corps stuff... a pretty young woman, all the cute graphics they did back then...

...Anyway, there was this one part of the vid where the woman tells the audience that if they'd ever heard that reciting songs and rhymes in your head can block a scan, you've actually learned it all _backwards_ \- it's we telepaths who have to recite rhymes in our heads to distract ourselves from hearing what _you're_ broadcasting down the hall. But not to worry, the video said - it's our job to accommodate ourselves to _you_ , not your job to do anything special to accommodate _us_. We will do everything in our power to keep from seeing what you're thinking without permission, or unless our job explicitly calls for us to pay attention, we know scanning is illegal, etc.... just be yourselves and don't worry about us.

Well, this one new guy at the company... he didn't quite take this vid in the right way. Or maybe he was just a jackass. I don't know, but from that moment on, every time he spotted a telepath, he started reciting songs in his head, over and over, ad nauseam. _This is the song that doesn't end..._ Just like that, but over and over, sometimes for literally hours at a time if we were around. We were at our wits' end, and none of the normals had any idea what he was doing.

...Yeah, he'd be like regular, and then if I walked in, and he spotted me, he'd start doing this, yes. With this little "gotcha" sneer on his face.

One of my friends had enough of it so they went and told him - privately of course - to knock it off, this was making it really hard for us to do our job, and he just blew up and accused my friend of unauthorized scanning, and even reported them to the Corps. The Corps found it sad and perhaps a bit funny, if I recall... it was pretty pathetic since of course no scan had ever happened, and his _entire purpose_ of singing to himself was so that we would be able to hear it and would be inconvenienced by it. But when we heard it, and told him so, he accused us of violating him anyway, somehow.

Look, mundanes don't make sense.

So then we knew he wasn't going to stop, because he knew he was annoying us and he was enjoying annoying us. He actually thought he was "one-upping" us or "protecting himself" from us. And we were all finding it very hard to do our jobs, to observe meetings, to write our reports, etc.

So one day I'd had enough, and decided to take matters into my own hands. I waited till we were at a big important meeting, with the boss - she was a serious woman who took no shit. And this guy was this young new hire, who'd been at the company maybe only a month or two? So it took a while till I was at a meeting with both of them there, and all these other people. But eventually the meeting happened.

And he started with his usual thing... _this is the song that doesn't end..._

And I flipped it around and started 'casting to him, _it's a small world after all..._

And after a few confused moments, he starts humming along. So then someone in the room asks, "is someone humming?" and he realizes he's doing that, and stops. But then a few moments later he's humming again, having no idea I'm doing this, or even that _he's_ doing it. This time, people see he's the source of the distraction, and directly ask him to stop, and he apologizes, and stops, but again, only for a minute or two and then he's back to humming. _It's a small world after all..._

Finally the boss herself asks him to stop, and he apologizes, and flushes red with embarrassment, and promises to stop, and of course keeps humming. The moment he would stop focusing on _not_ doing it, and would listen to what someone else was saying, it would sort of start up again on reflex.

After the third or fourth time this happened, the boss has concluded that either this new hire was completely incapable of not distracting a meeting, or else he was doing it intentionally. She pulled him out in the hall after the meeting and had a very stern talk with him about about professional behavior. He shot me this _what are you looking at?!_ nasty look over her shoulder.

I'm not completely sure what happened after that... I think after that incident, they also realized that the work he was producing wasn't up to standard. This guy was no bright light. In a month or so he was gone, and we never saw him again.

Oh, of course the other telepaths at the company were glad I did it. We could finally get our work done in peace again.

**Author's Note:**

> Byron Gordon in _Paragon of Animals_ : “Do you know what a telepath has to do in order to avoid picking up stray thoughts? We have to kick down our natural abilities. Run rhymes and little songs through our heads, round and round. All that to keep from picking up what you’re broadcasting loud enough to be heard halfway down the hall.”


End file.
